Growing New Brains

First off, this piece is not about tissue culturing adult sized brains that might be capable of “thinking.” Rather, it’s how a young neurobiologist became interested in her field and how that curiosity took her to transform skin cells into pluripotent stem cells and then grow up tiny cerebral organoids that have the differentiated regions of the cortex, hippocampus, and cerebellum—as in a nine week old fetus. Like other lab grown tissues, the obvious usefulness is in drug testing, but growing brains in the lab opens possibilities for understanding thought patterns and even consciousness, among other things that now fall into the philosophical realm. MORE